MAMETZ WOOD

AT seven in the morning, Brigade Headquarters was to 'close down' at one place and to 'open' at another. This has a sound of the impossible in it, but it is easily resolved into a problem of telephone communication. if there is a telephone at the new headquarters, giving a means of speech backward to Divisional Headquarters and forward to Battalion Headquarters, the command of the brigade can be as well exercised from the new hole in the ground as from the old For in this war, a telephone wire was not only the outward sign of command, but the life-blood of its existence, a General without a telephone was to all practical purposes impotent, a lay figure dressed in uniform, deprived of eyes, arms and ears

All through the night the signallers had worked at their task of picking and choosing the right wire from the tangled mass of tendrils that wound round post and trench in this desperate jungle, following the wire across country, testing it in sections, until the welcome sound of the right voice in response brought an end to their search. A chance shell, or the unlucky stumble of a passer-by, might cut the wire and send weary men out again on their search.

In the stuffy darkness of the old German dug-out an orderly lit a candle and roused us to say that it was half-past four. I swung my feet over the side of the wire-net mattress and stumbled up the stairs into the thin chill of the dawn, stupid and less than half awake, conscious chiefly of the difficulty of keeping my eyes from closing, and of a clammy, bitter-tasting thirst, a legacy from a short and too heavy sleep in a musty dug-out. Shivering and stretching, stamping my feet on the duckboards, swinging my arms like a cab-driver, I walked along towards the sound of a crackling wood fire and its promise of a cup of tea. There was an unnatural stillness in the air. No guns were firing, no transport moving. A thin column of smoke was rising slowly, twisting and swaying idly in the thin light. The whole world seemed to have slackened its pace to the merest saunter through the sky, with no perceptible disturbance of the morning air, without song of bird or step of man. A vague unreality had taken the place of the visible and audible environment, concealing all the muddle and horrors of the day before, revealing nothing but a sleeping shape stretching out over the chalky downs, blackening the light greenish-grey of the landscape.

As the light grew stronger, this straggling trail of black hardened into its distinguishable components; wagons, dumps of ammunition and stores, battery after battery of guns, big and small. A little below the dug-out, in the dip between it and the ground rising up towards Mametz, a string of guns squatted in a row, and from underneath a bivouac a gunner crept out, stretched himself and walked through the line of guns to a stake in the ground. From this he removed a lamp. Other men followed him, appearing mysteriously from nowhere, and soon there was a bustle of life in this tiny village of nomads.

Far away to the South a shell burst in the empty air. Somewhere behind our hill a big gun fired, another followed it, and suddenly the battery below blasted a stuttering sentence of noises. The Devil had taken his seat at the keyboard to play the opening bars of his morning hymn; another day beginning, the last day for so many, a fine sunny day to devote to killing and bruising. Was it my last day? With a wise obstinacy, the mind refused to dwell on such a thought, and the signalman in my brain shunted such futile traffic into some siding, giving the right of way to the greater utility of a desire for a cup of tea. I found some biscuit and a tin of jam, and sat on an ammunition box near the fire, eating and drinking in silence. When I had finished I went down into the dug-out for my shaving tackle, and as I descended the steps into a crescendo of foul stuffiness I wondered how I had dared to sleep in such a cesspool of smells, and hurried back to the trench to shave.

When I came back to the fire I found Taylor, the Brigade Signalling Officer, seated on a box and drinking his cup of tea. He was a man of forty, quietly carrying about him a reserved air of authority and competence, unhurried in movement and in speech. The technical nature of his work preserved him from interference, and he ruled over his kingdom of men with a certainty of control denied to an infantry officer. No Brigadier could dispute with him concerning the wisdom or unwisdom of his dispositions of men or material. His duty was to give others a means of speech, and as he never failed in his task, his competency was obvious to all.

This morning his face was as grey as his hair, and his eyes were dull and tired. I greeted him and sat down by his side.

'When did you finish your job?' I asked him. 'I've just come from there now, and I'm going back with some more men as soon as they have had a bite of food. It's a long tramp from here to Pommiers Redoubt, and I lost my way coming back. . . . Lost two men on the job already!'

'Killed?' I asked.

'No, both wounded - shrapnel in the leg. I had a terrible job to get them away. We were out on a line across country and I couldn't find a battalion or anybody likely to have stretcher-bearers. I tied them up as well as I could and went out on a search. I left my torch with them in case I couldn't find my way back in the dark. Just as I was giving it up and going back to them, a gun went off near me, a blaze of light and a hell of a noise. I was down on my face before you could say 'knife', and I crept along till I got a bit nearer, and then I shouted. A gunner came out and yelled to me to come in quickly before they fired again. So I got some stretcher-bearers and got my lads away. Two good men, just when I most wanted them. Still, they are well out of it, poor devils, with a day like this in front of them.'

'What's It like at Pommiers Redoubt?' I asked.

'Just like any other hole in the ground. There's some heavy artillery headquarters there, and we may be glad of their lines before the day is out. . . . There's a lot of our fellows out there not buried yet. . . . You know old Evans the padre?'

'Yes, I know him.'

'I met him this morning, half an hour ago, just as it was getting light. He was going to do a bit of burying. I thought he looked queer... he was talking to himself, praying, may be, when I walked along with him. It was in North Wales Welsh, and I couldn't make much of it. I got talking to him, and I asked him why he was up so early. He said he hadn't been to bed. He went towards Fricourt yesterday evening looking for a grave. Someone you knew, said I. .

Yes, my own boy's grave, said he.'

'Good God, I knew young Evans well - he was in the ranks with me,' I answered.

'Well, Evans, poor chap, had heard yesterday evening that his boy was killed near Fricourt the day before, so he went off at once to try to find his grave. He walked about for hours, but couldn't find any one who knew where it was, nor could he find the padre who buried him. He walked till he could walk no more, got a cup of tea from some gunners, and had a rest, and then walked back here. And now he's out again. Going to bury other people's boys, he said, since he couldn't find his own boy's grave to pray over. . . . What could you say? I left him to turn up to this place. . . my Welsh isn't very good, as you know, but I managed to say to him, "I'm not a soldier now, padre; I'm taking off my hat to you." And so I did, I took off my tin helmet. . . . You couldn't talk English to a man who had lost his boy. . . .'

'No. . . not to a Welshman,' I replied.

'But there's a man for you, Gruff. . . off to bury other men's boys at five in the morning, and maybe his own son not buried yet, a couple of miles away. There was some shrapnel overhead, but I saw him going up the slope as if he were alone in the world. if I come through this bloody business, I'd like to go to that man's church. The only thing he said that I could make out was that bit of a Welsh hymn-you'll know it, the one they sing at funerals to that tune that curdles your blood worse than the Dead March. . . . Well, this is no time to be talking of funerals, I'm going back to Pommiers Redoubt-are you coming with me?'

'I might as well,' I replied, 'I'm doing nothing here, but I'd better ask the Brigade Major first, in case he wants me.'

The Brigade Major, after some years in the East, was not at his best in the early morning, and in the minimum of words, told me that I could go.

Taylor was stuffing some biscuits into his haversack when I came back to him.

'You'd better do the same,' he said. 'You never know where you might land up to-day.'

'Cheer up, Taylor,' I answered. 'There are so many of us about to-day that you and I might well be booked for a through trip.'

I cut off a hunk of cheese and put it in my haversack with some biscuits, and filled my water-bottle: pipe, tobacco, matches, maps, note-book, orders-I made sure that these were On or about me.

We set off up the hill, passing the grey and red ruins of Mametz village on our left as we walked up towards Pommiers Redoubt. The guns were firing, and an occasional shell-burst crashed through the air with a venomous answer. Transport was crawling about in the distance, small groups of men were moving, dark against the white gashes in the chalk. Scattered equipment lying about underfoot, tangles of wire, small dumps of forgotten stores, all left behind in the advance. Other things were left behind in the advance, part of the purchase price of this downland, grim disfigured corpses rotting in the sun, so horrible in their discolour that it called for an act of faith to believe that these were once men, young men, sent to this degradation by their fellow men. One thought ran in and out of the mind like a shuttle in a loom; any one of the thousands of seconds in this July day might reduce Taylor or myself into a like travesty of living man, useless lumber best thrown away near some such heap of rubble as Mametz, 'where Ruin calls his brother Death'. There was some comfort in the thought that my wife did not know that this day held for me any fuller measure of danger than any other day of war, that for her there was no greater straining of the tense string that ran from hope to fear. And if I were killed, I would turn from man to memory in her heart without leaving a mutilated shell of flesh to haunt her eyes.

'I haven't seen anything of my young brother for some days,' I said to Taylor. 'I wonder what he is doing. He's such a kid, for all his uniform. He ought to be still in school, not in this bloody shambles.'

'He's all right,' replied Taylor. 'I saw him last night. The brigade called for two runners from each battalion, and he came as one of them - he's somewhere near that old German dug-out we came from.'

'I wish I'd known. It was his birthday two days ago, and I've got a little present for him in my valise. I wonder if he'll ever see another birthday. . . . I don't know how I could face my mother if anything happened to him and I got through.'

'Well, he's got a chance, Gruff - he might be in the line. What do you think of our job to-day?'

'The General was cursing last night at his orders. He said that only a madman could have issued them. He called the Divisional Staff a lot of plumbers, herring-gutted at that. He argued at the time, and asked for some control over the artillery that is going to cover us, but he got nothing out of them. We are not allowed to attack at dawn; we must wait for the show at Contalmaison, well away on our left.'

'We'll get a good view of that show from Pommiers Redoubt.'

'I dare say, but don't you think that it is a funny thing to keep us waiting in the lobby? We are going to attack Mametz Wood from one side, and Contalmaison is on the other side of the Wood-why shouldn't both attacks be made at the same time? It would spread out the German fire.'

'I suppose it would spread out ours too,' said Taylor, 'but if you are going to start asking "Why" about orders you'll soon be off the Staff or off your head. You might as well say, "Why attack the Wood at all?"

'But I do say that, Taylor. Look at it now- it's a forest. What damage can our guns do to that place? if you had a good dug-out near the edge of that wood, and a machine-gun, how many men would you allow to cross that slope leading up to the Wood? You'd mow them down as soon as they stood up.'

We had reached the high ground at Pommiers Redoubt, and, standing in a trench, scanning the Wood with our glasses, it seemed as thick as a virgin forest. There was no sign of life in it, no one could say whether it concealed ten thousand men or ten machine guns. Its edges were clean cut, as far as the eye could see, and the ground between us and the Wood was bare of any cover. Our men were assembled in trenches above a dip in the ground, and from these they were to advance, descend into the hollow, and cross the bare slope in the teeth of the machine-gunners in the Wood. On their right, as they advanced across the bullet-swept zone, they would be exposed to enfilade fire, for the direction of their advance was nearly parallel to the German trenches towards Bazentin, and it would be folly to suppose that the German machine-guns were not sited to sweep that slope leading to the Wood.

'I'm not surprised that the General cursed when he got his orders,' said Taylor. 'The truth about the Brigadier is that he's got too much sense. He was soldiering when some of the fellows above him were still playing marbles. I'm going to see my signallers. . . I'll see you later.'

A little further along the trench a group of officers were engaged in a discussion over a map spread out on a box. I went up to speak to them, and found that this was the headquarters of a group of Heavy Artillery concerned in the bombardment of Contalmaison, and about to wipe it off the map, as I gathered.

Taylor came up out of a dug-out. 'We're through to the old Brigade Headquarters, the Division, and to the battalions. How long we'll be through to the battalions is another story,' he said.

The General arrived with the Brigade Major and the Staff Captain, looked around him quickly, and turned to me.

'Have you found a good place for us?'

'Yes sir, there's room in the signallers' dugout, but this is a good place for seeing.'

'It's close on seven o'clock. Are we through to everybody, and have the battalions reported that they are in position?' he asked.

'Yes sir.'

'Then send out the report that Brigade Headquarters has opened here. You stay with me, and be ready to take down any orders or messages when the time comes.'

With this he went to consult with the Brigade Major. I stood on a step in the side of the trench, studying the country to the East and identifying the various features from the map. Our guns were quiet, and, although everybody within sight was moving, there was a weird stillness in the air, a brooding menace. Why was I standing here when men I knew were lined up in readiness to expose their bodies to a driving sleet of lead? The thought of the days' torment, doomed, as I thought, from its beginning, to bring no recompense, weighed like a burden of iron. The sound of a heavy bombardment, some distance away to our left, broke in upon the silence and grew to a storm of noise and smoke. Cont-al-maison was the target, prominent upon a hill until the smoke obscured the hill-top, turning it into a dark cloud hung between a blue sky and brown-pitted earth. Out of this cloud, at intervals of some minutes, an orange sheet of flame made an effort to escape, only to be conquered and smudged out by the all-pervading smoke. It did not seem possible that there could be guns enough in France to create such a fury as this, and my mind went back to the artillery fire of 1915 and early 1916. Our trench bombardments were things of no importance when contrasted with this, and I felt half ashamed to remember that they had frightened me.

At eight o'clock the artillery began its bombardment of the edge of Mametz Wood. A thousand yards away from where I stood, our two battalions were waiting. I read the orders again. The attack was to be carried out in three stages, beginning at half-past eight, reaching in succession three positions inside the Wood, under the protection of an artillery barrage. Smoke screens were to be formed here and there. Everything sounded so simple and easy.

A few minutes after eight, all our telephone wires to the battalions were cut by the enemy's reply to our fire. There was no smoke screen, for some reason never explained-perhaps someone forgot about it. This was the first departure from the simplicity of the printed word. Messages came through, a steady trickle of runners bringing evil news; our fire had not masked the German machine-guns in Mametz Wood, nor in the wood near Bazentin. The elaborate time-table suddenly became a thing of no meaning, as unrelated to our condition as one of Napoleon's orders; our artillery barrage was advancing in mockery of our failure, for we were two hundred yards away from the Wood.

A message arrived from the Division. In twenty minutes' time, the artillery would begin another bombardment of the edge of the Wood, and under cover of this we were to renew the attack - in twenty minutes. We were a thousand yards away from the battalions, with no telephone communication; there were maps at Divisional Headquarters, they knew where we were, they knew where the battalions were, and they knew that our lines were cut. A simple sum in arithmetic. . . . Our operation was isolated; no one was attacking on either flank of our Brigade, so that there was complete freedom of choice as to time. With all the hours of the clock to choose from, some master-mind must needs select the only hour to be avoided. He did not ask himself whether the order could reach its ultimate destination in time . . . the answer to that sum in arithmetic.

Every attempt to move near the Wood was met by a burst of frontal and enfilade machine-gun fire. Shells were falling, taking a steady toll of lives. Later, another order came from Divisional Headquarters. We were to attack again, to make a third effort to penetrate this wall of lead. The General gave some orders to his Brigade-Major, called me to accompany him, and we set out for Caterpillar Wood and to reach the battalions. Although the day was fine, the heavy rains of the preceding days had turned the chalky soil into a stiff glue. The hurry in our minds accentuated the slowness of our progress, and I felt as if some physical force was dragging me back. Haste meant a fall into a shell hole, for we had abandoned the attempt to move along the trench. Shrapnel was bursting overhead, and a patter of machine-gun bullets spat through the air. We passed through Caterpillar Wood, and in a disused trench on our left I saw an Artillery officer. I turned off to ask him whether his telephone was working, and learned that he was in communication with a Heavy Artillery Group somewhere beyond Pommiers Redoubt. I ran down the trench to rejoin the General, and we dropped down the bank into the nullah between Caterpillar Wood and Mametz Wood, passing a stream of 'walking wounded' making their way out. There was a dug-out in the bank, with scores of stretchers down on the ground in front, each stretcher occupied by a fellow creature, maimed and in pain. This was the Advance Dressing Station; twenty rounds of shrapnel would have made stretchers unnecessary. Along the bare ridge rising up to Mametz Wood our men were burrowing into the ground with their entrenching tools, seeking whatever cover they might make. A few shells were falling, surprisingly few. Wounded men were crawling back from the ridge, men were crawling forward with ammunition. No attack could succeed over such ground as this, swept from front and side by machine-guns at short range. Down in the nullah we were out of sight of the enemy, but fifteen minutes of shrapnel would have reduced the brigade to a battalion, and every minute that passed seemed to bring nearer the hour of our inevitable annihilation. We were caught in a trap, unable to advance, unable to withdraw without being observed. It must ever remain one of the many mysteries of the War why the enemy did not pound us with shell fire, for this was so obviously the only place of assembly.

The time was drawing near for the renewal of the attack, for another useless slaughter.

Casualties in officers had been extremely heavy, and the battalions were somewhat disorganized.

'This is sheer lunacy,' said the General. 'I've tried all day to stop it. We could creep up to the edge of the Wood by night and rush it in the morning, but they won't listen to me. . . . It breaks my heart to see all this.'

'If I could get you through on the telephone, would you talk to them again?' I asked.

'Of course I would, but all the wires are cut, and there is no time to go back.'

'I know of a telephone to an Artillery Group, and they might get you through to the Division,' I answered.

'Find out at once whether I can get through,' he replied.

I hurried up to the trench where I had seen the Artillery officer and found that his wires were still uncut, and as I ran back to the General I prayed in my heart that they would hold; the lives of some hundreds of men depended upon

it. It did not occur to me that words sent along that wire might fail in their object, that someone sitting far away would look at a map and say, 'No, you must reach that Wood at all costs.' Seen in its stark reality, our position was so hopeless that a dispassionate account of it must convince any one, even at a distance of six miles, that to remain where we were would be no less calamitous than to try to advance. The enemy had shown no desire to hold that exposed ridge with men, for his bullets were defence enough, and in a short space of time his artillery must realize that there was a magnificent target in that hollow between the ridge and the bank.

When I came back to the hollow, I could not find the General. I ran from one group of men to another, working my way up the ridge, until I found him organizing the defence of the position against any possible counter-attack. Shells did not seem to matter; my whole existence, up to that very minute, had been of no importance to the world, but my original conversation with that Artillery officer, so obviously prompted by what men call Destiny, could lead to the saving of hundreds of lives, and must not fail to do so. I knew that I had been 'chosen' for this. Ten minutes later I sat in the trench while the General spoke on the telephone, tersely describing the utter folly of any course of action other than a gradual withdrawal under cover of outposts, and quoting figures of our casualties. He was arguing with determination. There was opposition, but he won. As I jumped up to start On our way back to the ridge, he stopped me.

'Wait a minute. They are shelling this bank, and this message must get through. Give me a sheet of paper,' said he. He wrote down his order for the withdrawal and gave it to me. 'You go one way, and I'll go another way. Join me in the hollow. Go as fast as you can.' With this he went down the trench, and I ran and stumbled down the bank, still feeling perfectly safe in the hands of Destiny.

Two hours later the General and I were dragging our way from the nullah and back towards Pommiers Redoubt. We sat down in a trench to let a file of men pass by, and I suddenly noticed that his face was grey and drawn.

'Have you eaten anything since this morning?' I asked him.

'No. . . have you?' he replied. 'I feel whacked.'

'Will you wait here a few minutes - I'll be back soon,' I said.

I had seen a dug-out, and I went inside it. Some signallers were lighting a fire to boil a mess-tin full of water; they lent me an enamel cup, and in it I put a tablet of compressed tea. The brew was strong and the water was not boiling, but it was a warm drink, and I took it back to the General. It revived him, and we munched our biscuits as we walked along.

Back again to Pommiers Redoubt, but with a difference, in the flat greyness of approaching dusk. The noise of the guns had died down to a sullen scale-practice, with an occasional, and almost accidental chord, so different from the crashes of the day. Stretcher-bearers, bowed forward under their straps, were carrying their burdens of suffering across the ploughed and pitted slopes.

'How did you come to find that telephone?' asked the General.

'I happened to notice the Artillery officer on my way down, and I went to ask him if his line back was working. Don't you remember my leaving you?'

'No, I don't remember. . . . Well, it saved the lives of some hundreds of men, but it has put an end to me.'

'Why do you say that?'

'I spoke my mind about the whole business…you heard me. They wanted us to press on at all costs, talked about determination, and suggested that I didn't realize the importance of the operation. As good as told me that I was tired and didn't want to tackle the job. Difficult to judge on the spot, they said! As if the whole trouble hadn't arisen because someone found it so easy to judge when he was six miles away and had never seen the country, and couldn't read a map. You mark my words, they'll send me home for this: they want butchers, not brigadiers. They'll remember now that I told them, before we began, that the attack could not succeed unless the machine guns were masked. I shall be in England in a month.'

He had saved the Brigade from annihilation. That the rescue, in terms of men, was no more than a respite of days was no fault of his, for there is no saving of life in war until the eleventh hour of the last day is drawing to an end. It was nearly midnight when we heard that the last of our men had withdrawn from that ridge and valley, leaving the ground empty, save for the bodies of those who had to fall to prove to our command that machine guns can defend a bare slope. Six weeks later the General went home.

The next day brought no time for crying over spilt milk. The Staff Captain had become a casualty, and had been evacuated as a shellshock case, so that it fell to my lot to do his work, poorly equipped as I was for the task. For the first time I realized that, battle or no battle, reports must be made, returns prepared, and administrative work must continue as if we were all in barracks. I did my best, but if there are lacunæ in the statistics, memoranda 'lost' and unanswered, mine must be the blame. The General and the Brigade Major were so concerned with matters of war that I could not in very shame intrude upon their consultations to ask advice on questions that appeared to me to lack fundamental importance On paper, I promised where I did not perform, and, over the telephone, parried all demands from the Division.

The two remaining brigades of the Division were to attack Mametz Wood in the afternoon of the following day, and we were to be in reserve, ready to take over the defence of the wood if the attack succeeded. This venture was differently staged. A narrower front gave promise of greater support from the artillery, and the approach, bad as it was, did not make success impossible. Until we were called upon to fight, the brigade was to spend its time carrying and working for the others, in spite of our exhaustion in numbers and in strength. At the last moment, the attack was postponed for twelve hours, and it was not until dawn on the i oth July that the flower of young Wales stood up to the machine-guns, with a success that astonished all who knew the ground. Two of our battalions had become involved in the fighting in the Wood, and at five o'clock in the afternoon, our brigade was ordered to relieve the attacking brigades and to take over the responsibility for the defence of the sector against any counter-attacks. It was five o'clock in the morning before this relief was completed.

A little before dawn, the General and the Brigade Major went up to the Wood, leaving me to follow them at midday. At seven in the morning, as I was wrestling with some papers that I did not understand, a runner came in with a message from the General. The Brigade Major had been wounded, and I was to go up at once to join the General in the Wood. This, at any rate, was a man's job, and I left the papers in their disarray. A month ago, my military horizon was bounded by the limits of a company of infantry; now I was to be both Brigade Major and Staff Captain to a Brigadier-General in the middle of a battle. I consoled myself with the thought that if I could originate nothing, I could do what I was told to do.

I passed through two barrages before I reached the Wood, one aimed at the body, and the other at the mind. The enemy was shelling the approach from the South with some determination, but I was fortunate enough to escape injury and to pass On to an ordeal ever greater. Men of my old battalion were lying dead on the ground in great profusion. They wore a yellow badge on their sleeves, and without this distinguishing mark, it would have been impossible to recognize the remains of many of them. I felt that I had run away.

Before the Division had attempted to capture Mametz Wood, it was known that the undergrowth in it was so dense that it was all but impossible to move through it. Through the middle of the Wood a narow ride ran to a communication trench leading to the German main Second Line of defence in front of Bazen-tin, a strong trench system permitting of a quick reinforcement of the garrison of the Wood. With equal facility, the Wood could be evacuated by the enemy and shelled, as it was not part of the trench system.

My first acquaintance with the stubborn nature of the undergrowth came when I attempted to leave the main ride to escape a heavy shelling. I could not push a way through it, and I had to return to the ride. Years of neglect had turned the Wood into a formidable barrier, a mile deep. Heavy shelling of the Southern end had beaten down some of the young growth, but it had also thrown trees and large branches into a barricade. Equipment, ammunition, rolls of barbed wire, tins of food, gas-helmets and rifles were lying about everywhere. There were more corpses than men, but there were worse sights than corpses. Limbs and mutilated trunks, here and there a detached head, forming splashes of red against the green leaves, and, as in advertisement of the horror of our way of life and death, and of our crucifixion of youth, one tree held in its branches a leg, with its torn flesh hanging down over a spray of leaf.

Each bursting shell reverberated in a roll of thunder echoing through the Wood, and the acid fumes lingered between the trees. The sun was shining strongly overhead, unseen by us, but felt in its effort to pierce through the curtain of leaves. After passing through that charnel house at the southern end, with its sickly air of corruption, the smell of fresh earth and of crushed bark grew into complete domination, as clean to the senses as the other was foul. So tenacious in these matters is memory that I can never encounter the smell of cut green timber without resurrecting the vision of the tree that flaunted a human limb. A message was now on its way to some quiet village in Wales, to a grey farmhouse on the slope of a hill running down to Cardigan Bay, or to a miner's cottage in a South Wales valley, a word of death, incapable, in this late century of the Christian Era, of association with this manner of killing. That the sun could shine on this mad cruelty and on the quiet peace of an upland tarn near Snowdon, at what we call the same instant of Time, threw a doubt upon all meaning in words. Death was warped from a thing of sadness into a screaming horror, not content with stealing life from its shell, but trampling in lunatic fury upon the rifled cabinet we call a corpse.

There are times when fear drops below the threshold of the mind; never beyond recall, but far enough from the instant to become a background. Moments of great exaltation, of tremendous physical exertion, when activity can dominate over all rivals in the mind, the times of exhaustion that follow these great moments; these are, as I knew from the teachings of the months gone by, occasions of release from the governance of fear. As I hurried along the ride in this nightmare wood, stepping round the bodies clustered about the shell holes, here and there helping a wounded man to clamber over a fallen tree trunk, falling flat on my face when the whistle of an approaching shell grew into a shrieking 'YOU', aimed at my ear, to paralyse before it killed, then stumbling on again through a cloud of bitter smoke, I learned that there was another way of making fear a thing of small account.

It was life rather than death that faded away into the distance, as I grew into a state of not-thinking, not-feeling, not-seeing. I moved past trees, past other things; men passed by me, carrying other men, some crying, some cursing, some silent. They were all shadows, and I was no greater than they. Living or dead, all were unreal. Balanced uneasily on the knife-edge between utter oblivion and this temporary not-knowing, it seemed a little matter whether I were destined to go forward to death or to come back to life. Past and future were equidistant and unattainable, throwing no bridge of desire across the gap that separated me both from my remembered self and from all that I had hoped to grasp. I walked as on a mountain in a mist, seeing neither sky above nor valley beneath, lost to all sense of far or near, up or down, either in time or space. I saw no precipice, and so I feared none.

Thus it was that the passing seconds dealt a sequence of hammer-blows, at first so poignantly sharp that the mind recoiled in unbelief, but in their deadly repetition dulling the power of response and reaction into a blind acceptance of this tragedy, and in the merciful end, pounding all sensibility into an atrophy that refused to link sight to thought. A swirl of mist within me had thrown a curtain to conceal the chasm of fear, and I walked on unheeding and unexpectant.

I reached a cross-ride in the Wood where four lanes broadened into a confused patch of destruction. Fallen trees, shell holes, a hurriedly dug trench beginning and ending in an uncertain manner, abandoned rifles, broken branches with their sagging leaves, an unopened box of ammunition, sandbags half-filled with bombs, a derelict machine-gun propping up the head of an immobile figure in uniform, with a belt of ammunition drooping from the breech into a pile of red-stained earth - this is the livery of War. Shells were falling, over and short, near and wide, to show that somewhere over the hill a gunner was playing the part of blind fate for all who walked past this well-marked spot. Here, in the struggle between bursting iron and growing timber, iron had triumphed and trampled over an uneven circle some forty yards in diameter. Against the surrounding wall of thick greenery, the earth showed red and fresh, lit by the clean sunlight, and thesplintered tree-trunks shone with a damp whiteness, but the green curtains beyond could conceal nothing of greater horror than the disorder revealed in this clearing.

Even now, after all these years, this round ring of man-made hell bursts into my vision, elbowing into an infinity of distance the wall of my room, dwarfing into nothingness objects we call real. Blue sky above, a band of green trees, and a ploughed graveyard in which living men moved worm-like in and out of sight; three men digging a trench, thigh-deep in the red soil, digging their own graves, as it chanced, for a bursting shell turned their shelter into a tomb; two signallers crouched in a large shell hole, waiting for a summons to move, but bearing in their patient and tired inactivity the look of dead men ready to rise at the trump of a Last Judgment.

Other memories steal upon the screen of vision, growing imperceptibly from a dim remembrance of a part into a firmly-built unity of composition as the eye gains control over its focussing, but this image of war in its brutality flashes in an instant, sharp and clear in its uttermost detail. Then, at its first seeing, it was unreal, unrelated to my past, for the mist was within me, but now and for ever it must rise with every closing of my eyes into a stabbing reality that governs the future. So many things are seen more clearly now that the passing years have allowed the mud of action to settle at the bottom of the pool of life.

Near the edge of this ring I saw a group of officers. The Brigadier was talking to one of his battalion commanders, and Taylor, the Signals officer, was arguing with the Intelligence officer about the position on the map of two German machine-guns. The map itself was a sign of the shrinking of our world into a small compass: a sheet of foolscap paper bearing nothing but a large scale plan of Mametz Wood, with capital letters to identify its many corners, was chart enough for our adventure this day. 'What has happened to the Brigadier?' I asked Taylor. 'Why is his arm in a sling?'

'Shrapnel,' he answered. 'He got hit as he was coming up to the Wood, but he got the doctor to dress it for him. He says it doesn't hurt him, but I expect it will before the day is over.'

'Did you see the Brigade Major . . . was he badly hit?'

'Shrapnel in the leg - his gammy leg. The stretcher-bearers took him away, cursing everybody and damning his luck. Seems to me he doesn't know luck when he sees it. You'll have to get down to it now.'

'Yes. Tell me what has happened so far.'

'You never saw such a mess. Nobody knows where anybody is, the other brigades are still here-what's left of them-all mixed up.'

'Are your lines holding? Are you through to anybody?'

'Devil a soul,' answered Taylor. 'As soon as I mend a line the Boche breaks it. You can't keep a line up with that barrage across the bottom of the Wood. There's an artillery F.O. O. just behind you, in that shell hole; I don't know what the devil he's doing up here - he can't see twenty yards in front of him, and all his lines are gone. He might as well be in Cardiff.'

As soon as the battalion commander had gone I joined the Brigadier.

'Is this the Brigade Headquarters?' I asked. 'It is,' he replied. 'It's an unhealthy place, but we've got to be somewhere where we can be found by night as well as by day. Get your notebook and take down the position of affairs at the moment. We have been sent here to take over the line and to make secure against counterattacks. There are four battalions of our brigade, and what is left of four other battalions. We are holding an irregular line about three hundred yards from the end of the Wood, bending back towards the West. The units are very mixed up, and I've just come back from trying to give them their boundaries. They are all straightening themselves out and digging in, but the undergrowth is so dense that it will be some hours before they are in their proper places.'

'Are we supposed to attack and clear the Wood?'

'No. Our orders last night were to take over the line. I've told the battalion commanders to reconnoitre and to push out where they can. We don't know whether the enemy is holding the far end in any great strength.'

'If we have to attack later on, how do you propose to do it?'

'By surprise,' answered the General. 'With the bayonet only. That's the only way to get through the Wood. if our artillery will keep quiet, we can do it. Here's my map - make a summary of what I've told you. It took me hours to get round our line.'

Runners came from the battalions giving news of progress in consolidation, and reporting that the enemy was in considerable strength on the Northern edge, with plenty of machineguns. I sat down on a fallen tree-trunk and made a report of the situation, read it over to the General, and went in search of a runner to take it to the Division. Taylor was standing by a large shell hole, talking to his signallers.

'How can I get this to the Division?' I asked.

'Give it to me: that's my job. I've got a telephone down at Queen's Nullah, and if a runner can get out of the Wood and through the barrage, the message gets through.'

'Are the runners getting through?'

'Some don't, and some of those that do don't get back. . . . Don't give me any messages that are not absolutely essential and urgent. I'm getting short of men-seven down already this morning. I don't know what it will be like when the Boche wakes up. He's got us taped here. Look at those cross-rides-did you ever see such a butcher's shop?'

At this moment a signaller orderly came up to deliver a message. I opened it, glanced through it, and took it to the General. His face hardened as he read it. The Divisional Commander informed us that the enemy's trenches in front of Bazentin were being shelled, and that it was quite impossible that he had any strong force in Mametz Wood. The brigade was to attack and occupy the Northern and Western edges of the Wood at the earliest possible moment. Indeed, the Corps Commander strongly impressed the importance of clearing the Wood without delay.

While we were digesting this order, and drafting new orders to the battalions, a Staff Officer came up to join us. His red and black arm-band showed that he came from Army Headquarters, and he spoke with all the prestige native to a traveller from distant lands who had penetrated to within a few hundred yards of the enemy. He brought orders that we were to carry out an attack upon the two edges of the Wood. The Brigadier listened to him with the patience of an older man coldly assessing the enthusiasm of youth. When the Staff Officer had finished, the General spoke.

'I've just had orders from the Division to attack and clear the rest of the Wood, and to do it at once. The defence is incomplete, the units are disorganized, and I did not propose to attack until we were in a better position. My patrols report that the Northern edge is strongly held. I haven't a fresh battalion, and no one can say what is the strength of any unit.'

'What do you propose to do?' asked the Staff Officer.

'My intention is to take the remainder of the Wood by surprise, with the bayonet if possible; no artillery bombardment to tell him that we are coming. I want a bombardment of the main German second line when we have taken our objective, to break up any counter-attack. Do you know anything about the artillery programme?'

'No, I do not. Are you in communication with the Division or with any of the artillery groups?'

'No, except by runner, and that takes a long time. I'm issuing orders to the battalions to get ready to advance quietly at three o'clock, and I'm sending a copy of the order to the Division; if you are going back will you get in touch with them as soon as possible and tell them that I don't want a barrage?'

The Staff Officer left us, and we worked at the orders for the battalions. The enemy was shelling the Wood, searching it, as the gunners say, and there were intermittent bursts of machine-gun fire, with an occasional uneven and untidy rush of rifle fire. On our right a few bombs burst in a flat, cracking thud. At a quarter to three, while we were waiting for the hour, a sudden storm of shells passed over our heads, bursting in the Wood some two hundred yards ahead of us.

'Good God,' said the General. 'That's our artillery putting a barrage right on top of our battalion! How can we stop this? Send a runner down at once. . . send two or three by different routes . . . write the message down.'

Three men went off with the message, each by a different way, with orders to get to Queen's Nullah somehow or other. Our barrage had roused the enemy, and from every direction shells were falling in the Wood; behind us a devilish storm of noise showed that a heavy price must be paid for every attempt to leave the Wood.

The Brigadier sat on a tree-trunk, head on hand, to all appearances neither seeing nor hearing the shells.

'This is the end of everything . . . sheer stupidity. I wonder if there is an order that never reached me . . . but that Staff Officer ought to have known the artillery programme for the day. And if there is another order, they ought not to have put down that barrage until they got my acknowledgement. How can we attack after our own barrage has ploughed its way through us? What good can a barrage do in a wood like this?'

At twenty past three our own artillery was still pouring shells into the wood. None of the runners had returned. Taylor sent three more to try to rescue us from this double fire, but ten minutes later we were left with no worse burden than the enemy's shelling. Reports came through from the battalions that we had suffered severely. As the afternoon drew out into the evening, we nibbled away here and there with fluctuating fortune, but at the approach of night the enemy reinforced his line and kept us from the edge while he pounded away with his artillery.

It was nearing dusk when Taylor came up to me.

'I want to have a word with you,' he said, drawing me away. 'I've got bad news for you. . . .'

'What's happened to my young brother. . . is he hit?'

'You know the last message you sent out to try to stop the barrage . . . well, he was one of the runners that took it. He hasn't come back.

He got his message through all right, and on his way back through the barrage he was hit. His mate was wounded by the shell that killed your brother. . . he told another runner to tell us.'

'My God. . . he's lying out there now, Taylor!'

'No, old man.. . he's gone.'

'Yes . . . yes, he's gone.'

'I'm sorry. . . I had to send him, you know.'

'Yes, of course. . . you had to. I can't leave this place. . . . I suppose there's no doubt about his being killed?'

'None-he's out of it all now.'

So I had sent him to his death, bearing a message from my own hand, in an endeavour to save other men's brothers; three thoughts that followed one another in unending sequence, a wheel revolving within my brain, expanding until it touched the boundaries of knowing and feeling. They did not gain in truth from repetition, nor did they reach the understanding. The swirl of mist refused to move.

Within the unclouded portion of my being a host of small things took their place on the stage, drawing their share of attention, and passing on. More orders to draft, situation reports to send out, demands for more bombs, enemy trench-mortars to be shelled into silence, machine-guns wanted by everybody. The General put his hand on my shoulder. It began to grow dark. An order came from the Division to say that we would be relieved that night by a brigade from another Division, and that on completion of the relief we were to return to our bivouacs. More orders to the battalions. The wheel was still revolving, while the procession of mere events moved without a break.

I walked towards the large shell hole that served as a shelter for the signallers, carrying in my hand a sheaf of messages for delivery. From the background of bursting shells came a whistle, deepening into a menace, and I flung myself on my face. I remembered a momentary flash of regret that I was still two yards from the protection of that shell hole. A black noise covered everything. When my eyes opened I was lying on my back, further away from the hole. I got up on my hands and knees and crawled to the signallers, still clutching the crumpled messages, and spoke to them. There was no answer. The rim of another large shell hole nearly touched their shelter, and the three signallers were huddled together, dead, killed by the concussion, for there was no mark of a wound.

The wheel came to rest, and I do not remember much of what happened afterwards. The night came, within and without. I have a clear memory of walking up the ride towards the battalions, of tripping over a branch, and of a flash of anger because I hurt my shoulder when I fell. The General went forward to one battalion to make sure that the line was securely held to cover the relief, and I went to another battalion on the same errand. The night seemed to pass in a black film, broken only by the flashes of bursting shells. I am told that I found the battalion.

Some time later, a heavy storm of shell fire drove me into a little trench where I crouched with some men to shelter. We talked in Welsh, for they were Anglesey folk; one was a young boy, and after a thunderous crash in our ears he began to cry out for his mother, in a thin boyish voice, 'mam, mam. . . .' I woke up and pushed my way to him, fumbling in my pockets for my torch, and pulled him down to the bottom of the trench. He said that his arm was hurt. A corporal came to my assistance and we pulled off his tunic to examine his arm. He had not been hit, but he was frightened, still crying quietly. Suddenly he started again, screaming for his mother, with a wail that seemed older than the world, in the darkness of that night. The men began to mutter uneasily. We shook him, cursed at him, threatening even to kill him if he did not stop. He did not understand our words, but the shaking brought him back. He demanded his rifle and his steel helmet, and sat in the bottom of the trench to wait for the relief, talking rationally but slowly. English voices came out of the dark, enquiring for another battalion of our brigade; more men stumbled by in search of the posts they were to relieve. Our time was drawing to an end.

Dawn was breaking when I reached the clearing. The General had been waiting for me; another wave had passed over our brigade, and all the men of our battalions who were destined to leave the Wood were now on their way down to the bivouacs. He looked at mc and asked me if I would like to sit down to rest, but I wanted to go on. We picked our way over the fallen timber and round the corpses, some sprawling stiffly, some huddled against the splintered tree-trunks, until we were clear of the Wood. I was afraid to look closely at them, lest I should recognize one of them.

Below the Wood, the enemy was still maintaining a barrage, but we were too tired to hurry. Our field-guns were pushing up towards the slopes, some were in position and were firing to support the attack on the German second line. With them was another brother of mine, a bombardier, but I did not know it. We walked in silence, until the General asked mc if I had any food. I found some biscuits in my haversack, and realized that I had not eaten for twenty-four hours.

It was eight o'clock when we reached the old German dug-out and drank a cup of tea. As we were finishing, a Staff Officer from the Division arrived to tell us that we were to get ready to move at short notice. Protest was useless; the battalions must be clear of the bivouacking ground by five o'clock the next morning, and we must march a distance of fourteen miles to another sector of the front.

The day passed in getting ready for the march, and in trying to write a letter to my father and mother to tell them what had happened. When at last I succeeded, I felt in some queer way that an episode was ended, that all feeling had been crushed out of existence within me. Night came, but I could not sleep. At two in the morning we set out to join the battalions, and as dawn was breaking over Bazentin, I turned towards the green shape of Mametz Wood and shuddered in a farewell to one, and to many. I had not even buried him, nor was his grave ever found.